Good morning, everyone.
It’s been about a week since the City of Calgary turned the water back on.
Last Friday, officials announced that tests on the Bearspaw South Feeder Main, which supplies 60 per cent of the city’s treated water, had been successful and water use restrictions could be immediately lifted.
There was definitely a collective sigh of relief from the 1.6 million people who inhabit Alberta’s largest city and had been asked to keep showers to three minutes, flush toilets only when needed and run washing machines sparingly since the pipe ruptured on Dec. 30.
Mayor Jeromy Farkas called it a happy day and thanked residents for helping cut back on water use making the repairs easier.
But all is not well. That was the second time the same water main had ruptured in under two years.
A third-party investigation published earlier in the month found that the city of Calgary ignored two decades of warnings about the pipe’s vulnerabilities. That led to finger-pointing at current and past city administrators and elected officials, and the province has now launched its own inquiry into what exactly has been going on with municipal infrastructure.
And Calgary isn’t unique. The Globe and Mail’s Patrick White this week described what happened as a “harbinger of water woes to come across the country unless municipalities get serious about investing in their aging pipes.”
“Calgary is a wake-up call,” said Alireza Bayat, an engineering professor at the University of Alberta and director of the Canadian Underground Infrastructure Innovation Centre. “We need to do something about this underground infrastructure, otherwise things like this are going to keep happening.”
According to a 2024 Utah State University study, Canadian water mains break about 11 times a year for every 100 kilometres of pipe. In the United States, the rate is significantly lower at 6.9 times per 100 kilometres, mostly due to our colder weather and more corrosive soil.
While cold weather and corrosive soil are partly to blame for the vulnerability of our aging network of pipes, “tight municipal budgets and politicians focused on four-year election cycles” are also to blame, reported White.
“We now have what I would call true intergenerational inequity,” said Carl Yates, an engineer who spent more than three decades with Halifax Water. He says if municipalities don’t start ramping up spending on upgrades, “we’re going to screw the grandkids, we’re going to kick it down the road for someone else to deal with.”
According to Statistics Canada, spending on drinking water in the country is a fraction of what is needed to adequately rehabilitate the system. Using 2022 numbers, the agency estimates that governments need to budget $42-billion on potable water infrastructure. Actual capital spending on drinking water in 2022 came to about $4.3-billion.
As The Globe’s editorial board argued this week, what happened in Calgary could and should have been prevented, especially since the city knew the Bearspaw main was at risk as far back as 2004 when another pipe ruptured.
“Effectively, the city kept rolling the dice.”
This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.
